Coal is used to make a surprising everyday ingredient in food

Have you ever looked at the back of a vanilla ice cream carton,
read "natural and artificial vanilla," and wondered exactly what
you're eating?

Chances are it's synthetic vanillin, which tastes
like real vanilla extract. Today,
over 95% of vanilla flavoring used in foods, from cereal to
ice cream, comes from vanillin.

The Museum of Food and Drink
recently opened in Brooklyn, and its first exhibition looks at
the complex history of synthetic vanilla. It started in
1858, when French chemist discovered how to isolate real
vanillin, the main component of the vanilla bean.

Vanillin can come from vanilla beans, but the process takes
a lot of labor and land to produce, so chemists have
gotten crafty in the materials they've used to
make synthetic vanillin in a lab.

One of these many sources is ... coal tar.

Wikipedia
Commons

German chemists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann
later found they could replicate vanilla by
using chemical compounds from coal in 1874. This was a huge
innovation for the flavor industry (which would grow to the
$25 billion industry that it is today), because it meant
scientists could make synthetic vanilla by using something
other than the vanilla bean.

By the 1930s, artificial vanilla (some derived from
coal) became mainstream in US households.

An FDA chemist in the
1960s works to make safe coal tar for flavoring used in
foods.Wikipedia
Commons

In the US, coal tar is not as widely used as it once was to
make artificial vanilla due to health concerns.
Some studies show that consuming flavors derived from large
amounts of coal can be carcinogenic. It's still used in many
vanilla-flavored foods in Mexico, where there are fewer food
and labeling regulations.

Coal tar isn't the only thing that's been used to produce
synthetic vanillin. Over the last century, cinnamon, paper waste,
pine bark, and even cow poop has mimicked the taste and smell of
real vanilla.

Because it’s so cheap, annual global demand for imitation
vanilla is nearly
37 times that for natural vanilla extract.